NAME

DESCRIPTION

/etc/updatedb.conf is a text file. Blank lines are ignored. A #
character outside of a quoted string starts a comment extending until
end of line.
Other lines must be of the following form:
VARIABLE="VALUE"
White space between tokens is ignored. VARIABLE is an alphanumeric
string which does not start with a digit. VALUE can contain any
character except for ". No escape mechanism is supported within VALUE
and there is no way to write VALUE spanning more than one line.
Unknown VARIABLE values are considered an error. The defined variables
are:
PRUNEFS
A whitespace-separated list of file system types (as used in
/etc/mtab) which should not be scanned by updatedb(8). The file
system type matching is case-insensitive. By default, no file
system types are skipped.
When scanning a file system is skipped, all file systems mounted
in the subtree are skipped too, even if their type does not
match any entry in PRUNEFS.
PRUNENAMES
A whitespace-separated list of directory names (without paths)
which should not be scanned by updatedb(8). By default, no
directory names are skipped.
Note that only directories can be specified, and no pattern
mechanism (e.g. globbing) is used.
PRUNEPATHS
A whitespace-separated list of path names of directories which
should not be scanned by updatedb(8). Each path name must be
exactly in the form in which the directory would be reported by
locate(1).
By default, no paths are skipped.
PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS
One of the strings 0, no, 1 or yes. If PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS is 1
or yes, bind mounts are not scanned by updatedb(8). All file
systems mounted in the subtree of a bind mount are skipped as
well, even if they are not bind mounts.
By default, bind mounts are not skipped.

NOTES

When a directory is matched by PRUNEFS, PRUNENAMES or PRUNEPATHS,
updatedb(8) does not scan the contents of the directory. The path of
the directory itself is, however, entered in the created database. For
example, if /tmp is in PRUNEPATHS, locate(1) will not show any files
stored in /tmp, but it can show the /tmp directory. This behavior
differs from traditional locate implementations.
In some updatedb(8) implementations PRUNEPATHS can be used to exclude
non-directory files. This is not the case in this implementation.
/etc/updatedb.conf is a shell script in some implementations, which
allows much more flexibility in defining the variables. Equivalent
functionality can be achieved by using the command-line options to
updatedb(8).